Fancy Fair!

Greetings to one and all! As promised, I am being extremely sporadic with this blog, writing when where and how suits me...If this means that the content of my entries is occasionally a bit stilted, then so be it...the life of a young boy traveler is far from predictable, and it is only fitting that my journalising reflect this, right?

Summertime, and the livin' is far from easy. For the second half of last week a kind of gradual fatigue was setting in, and no matter what fun games we played or what crazy songs we learned in class (Sweet Home Alabama, anyone?) I was definitely feeling the need for a break by the end of Friday's lesson. Luckily, last weekend was the occasion of the MID-POINT BREAK, so any need for drinking, dancing, chilling and NOT planning lessons for the next morning was most certainly met!

All of us volunteer types (there are 10 of us in total in Mauritius, and one program director) converged on sweet home Chamarela (my adopted home village) to see the sights, groove to the music and get soaked to the skin by the good ole' Chamtown downpours. The reasons why everyone came to Chamarel were simple - not only is it incredibly beautiful and surrounded by mountains, but it is also host to an epic cultural event known as the 'Fancy Fair' to celebrate the Sunday after St. Anne's day. Catholicism has a strong following in Mauritius and especially in Chamarel, where a decent-sized, tin-roofed church dominates the town centre. More on religion in Mauritius in a later entry...there is way too much of it to fit in here!

The Fancy Festival was on Sunday, but before that, we had 2 days and most importantly 2 nights to kill in a sleepy Mauritian village. On Friday afternoon we took a trip to the Seven-Coloured Earth, an interesting geographical phenomenon, where volcanic activity and natural elements in the soil have basically turned a large patch of ground outiside the village...seven colours! And as if that wasn't enough, there were giant tortoises wandering around next to it! On the way, we also stopped by the massive 'Cascades de Chamarel' - two giant waterfalls, plunging off a cliff into a deep, rainforested valley. Very very 'Jurassic Park'. The cool thing is that even though these two sites (like many of the most interesting things in Mauritius, it seems) were pay-for-entry, all of us got in for free because Jean-François, my Mauritian 'host dad' works the entry gate!

Friday night we all had a crazy party with drinking games, dancing on tables and my trademark random guitar singsongs at 'La Cure', a church property where we were generously being allowed to stay for the weekend. I guess they would have been even more surprised at the amount of hard alcohol that was consumed over the weekend as I was to find that 70cl of wondrous sugarcane rum cost 100 rupees (about £2), or less if you brought the bottle back...

Saturday we rose bright and early and embarked on an epic hike to the summit of the highest mountain in Mauritius! Le Grand Piton is, despite being less than 1000m high, very imposing, partly because it rises from very close to the sea. This means that it looks freakin' huge! Sadly our hike ran into a couple of problems, namely mud, rain, mud and thick cloud all around the summit. Beautiful views there were not, and while I am still quite happy in a t-shirt on top of a mountain in the middle of Mauritian winter, some people were less so. So down the mountain we went, most par derriere i.e. on our asses, like some giant muddy slide. Everything was soaking, the ground, our clothes, my ipod (sadly it has yet to recover...R.I.P., methinks).
BUT
I had a wonderful wonderful time...Despite the clouds, the rain, everything like that, climbing a mountain was the antidote to lesson planning. I am now in a Zen state...

And Sunday was the Fancy Fair! A crazy melange of church-service with very dancey 'Sega'-guitar accompaniment, market full of flip-flops, food and bootleg dvds (French-language 'Inception', anybody?), and a stagefull of live music and pint-sized Sega dancers. I lost count of the number of faratas I ate during the day...or the weird deep-fried Mauritian snacks which I sampled. The event brought hundreds and hundreds of people to the tiny town of Chamarel. Our classroom was transformed into a disco, and the devastation and smell of ganja was so severe that the next morning we had to hold a games-based lesson outside. The festival music, mostly local bands come to play for the benefit of the church, was a mixture of reggae, rap and of course even more Sega! Some great bands, including Chamarel's very own 'Natur' reggae outfit took the stage, but it was a little disheartening that as well as being the online white kids in the crowd, us volunteers were ummm....the only ones dancing.

As well as being a religious festival, the Fancy Fair had a pretty strong rasta vibe...I saw some of the craziest knee-length dreads ever, and the number of obvious smoking circles around the fair was pretty amusing. The police didn't seem to be chasing anyone up, confirming the impression I've got that Chamarel is pretty relaxed about such things!

Phew....What a weekend. I'm gonna end this here, and hit the beach!
Check out next entry, when your humble narrator will return to his natural mode of transport, and investigate the murky underworld of hitchhiking in Mauritius!